Donald Trump endured a hellish legal week, sitting in court for the first three days of his civil fraud trial and suffering setbacks in a number of cases against him.
The former president's fraud trial will continue next week after he lost a bid on Friday to halt the proceedings while he fights a pretrial ruling that could strip him of Trump Tower and other prized properties.
An appeals court judge rejected Trump's bid to pause the trial, but agreed to leave him in control of his business holdings for now.
Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case, resolved the top claim in New York Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit before the trial began. He ruled that Trump routinely deceived banks, insurers and others by exaggerating the value of assets on his annual financial statements, which were used to secure loans and make deals.
Trump, who is running to regain the White House, has denied wrongdoing. He appeared subdued as he sat the courtroom on the first day of the trial. However, he railed in front of television cameras during a lunch break, calling the case a "witch hunt" and attacking both Engoron and James. There is no jury in the trial as neither side requested one.
Trump's lawyers had asked the state's intermediate appellate court to suspend the trial and prevent Engoron from enforcing a ruling he made last week. This revoked Trump's business licenses and puts a court-appointed receiver in charge of his companies, which legal experts called a "corporate death penalty."
Trump's lawyers argued that the ruling could cause harm to not only Trump and other defendants, but also up to 1,000 employees.
Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said he was pleased the appeals court "upheld New York law and put a halt to any cancellation of business certificates, receivers or dissolution," The Associated Press reported.
However, James said Trump's side was "falsely claiming victory" for a resolution that her office had proposed.
"Once again, Donald Trump's attempts to delay this trial have been rejected," James said in a statement. "Yet another court denied his efforts to evade justice for his years of fraud. But Donald Trump lives in a fantasy world where money grows on trees and facts don't matter."
As the trial was underway, Engoron on Thursday ordered that Trump and other defendants in the case give a court-appointed monitor, retired federal judge Barbara Jones, a list of all entities covered by the ruling. They would also provide Jones with advance notice of any application for new business licenses in any jurisdiction, as well as any attempts to create new entities to "hold or acquire" assets of current companies.
Trump's lawyers on Thursday dropped a lawsuit they filed against Engoron after the appellate rejected the last-minute bid to delay the trial.
Michael McAuliffe, a former federal prosecutor and elected state attorney, told Newsweek that, like much of what Trump does, the lawsuit was "a short-term tactical move designed to delay the start of the civil fraud trial.
"When the maneuver of filing suit against the presiding judge didn't work—the trial started as scheduled—the main reason for the suit evaporated," McAuliffe added.
In a setback in a different case, a federal judge rejected one of Trump's expert witnesses in a trial to determine damages for the writer E. Jean Carroll.
Carroll in 2019 first publicly claimed that Trump attacked her in the dressing room of a luxury department store in the 1990s. The former president denied that anything happened. In May, a jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages, concluding she was sexually abused and defamed by Trump, but rejecting the allegation that she was raped.
Her lawyers now seek another $10 million in compensatory damages and "substantially more" in punitive damages for remarks he made while president and after the jury's verdict, the AP reported.
In an order on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan granted Carroll's request to preclude the testimony of Robert J. Fisher, Trump's proposed expert witness intended to rebut Carroll's witness, sociologist Ashlee Humphreys.
Meanwhile, Trump has dropped his $500 million lawsuit against Michael Cohen. His former lawyer and fixer is now a key witness in a criminal case connected to hush money payments made during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
Trump had accused Cohen of "spreading falsehoods" "with malicious intent" and causing "vast reputational harm" for talking publicly about the payments made to women during Trump's 2016 campaign.
Trump faces 91 charges across the four criminal cases, two filed in federal court in Washington and Florida, and two in state courts in New York and Georgia.
The Washington and Georgia cases are related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, while the Florida case alleges he mishandled classified documents.
ABC News and The New York Times this week reported that Trump had allegedly shared potentially classified information about U.S. submarines with nuclear capability with Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt at his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office. Federal investigators looking into Trump's handling of classified documents interviewed Pratt about the conversation, the reports said.
The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said Pratt could be among the people called to testify in the classified documents case.
But, in a victory for Trump, Judge Aileen Cannon—the Trump-appointed judge overseeing the case—has placed a temporary pause on litigation involving materials in the case as she mulls a request from Trump to postpone the trial until after the 2024 election. It is currently scheduled for trial in May.
The past week was "a bruising one for Trump in court," former federal prosecutor Harry Litman said on MSNBC.
"I think this fraud trial is one of the real things, meaning this has been the first week of the rest of Donald Trump's life." Litman added. "He is now in a trial that could really damage him... And there's four others on the horizon. All in all, rough week for him."
Newsweek has contacted a Trump spokesperson for comment via email.
